Tales of the Witch (3 page)

When he raised puzzled eyebrows at that—his mouth being too loaded to open—she explained she had ‘borrowed’ a few of Mrs. Elias’ lunches he had himself prepared to provide some of the ingredients of the paella. After all, he always fixed his wife such an overwhelming amount each day, much too much for only one woman.

Mr. Elias froze. His massive jaws ceased to chew and remained poised in place like a great masticating machine from which someone had pulled the plug. The color fled from his perspiring, ruddy face. He stood there holding the dish close under his chin, in the center of his shop, in a shock his friends couldn’t understand, because the paella was no doubt as delicious as he’d said. Just as his eyes had reached the size of golf balls, he swiveled sideways, still not chewing or swallowing, to stare at his wife. The moment he spotted her in the back of the crowd, he caught sight of the milkman seizing his bewildered wife and planting on her soft lips a kiss that would’ve brought cheers in the late night movies.

Ike promptly spewed the contents of his full mouth all over his disgusted customers, turned purple in the face, clenched his teeth, then reeled and hit the floor like a felled oak.

Days of hysteria, questions, and long testimonies fraught with suspicions and accusations later, Mrs. Elias attended the funeral of her husband. After a proper two more days, she installed an air-conditioner in the upstairs rooms, where she then sat and spent hours doodling designs for a new sign proclaiming ‘Flower Shop and Nursery.’

It wasn’t long before she decided to visit the witch. She had a few questions she wanted answered.

She waited at the end of the path, where the milkman had waited with his truck, although she didn’t know that, and felt sure the witch would know she was there and would come. And she did.

“It’s the oddest thing. I can’t help this feeling I have that somehow you’re connected with the death of my husband. But I can’t quite see how. Or…” She brushed glossy thick hair back away from her face. She sighed. “There was so much—so much going on that you couldn’t have known.”

Mrs. Risk smiled. “On the contrary, my dear. There was much you didn’t know, yourself. I knew it all. Here. Have a little of this.”

“What is it?”

“Carrot juice. You quite need building up. About that, your departed husband was quite right. Tell me, Mrs. Elias. When you began your new preoccupation with gardening, is that about the time Ike began his devoted lunch preparations for you?”

Mrs. Elias gazed with disgust at the orange liquid in her glass, then frowned off into the distance. Mrs. Risk had taken her back to her house and they sat on a bench beneath a huge shady tree. The breeze was pleasantly cooling. “You know, I think it was. Isn’t that funny?”

“No, it’s not funny at all. Didn’t you tell me that he insisted that you use pesticides instead of the natural methods I suggested?”

“Oh, yes. He said it was bad enough the time I already spent in the garden without doing extra stuff. He wouldn’t permit it. What could I say? He went out and bought the chemicals for me, so I used them. I really didn’t have any choice.”

“Yes. That was another thing. You had no choice. You have no friends, either, I noticed. And you weren’t even permitted to talk with people in the shop. You had things delivered to you, you didn’t shop, didn’t visit anyone, never went anywhere…I noticed.”

Mrs. Elias stiffened. After a long silence, she said, “What are you suggesting?”

“I’m merely answering your questions. Here’s a question for you: did you ever have your ‘lunch’ analyzed by a pathologist? No, of course not. How silly of me, you weren’t permitted to leave the house. Well, I did. They contained pesticides. That first—lunch—I analyzed didn’t contain enough to kill you, but enough to make you ill. Increasingly ill, because the doses were gradually increasing.”

Mrs. Elias’ lips moved, but nothing came out.

“Ironically, it was only because of your wonderful constitution that Ike claimed to have been tending that you survived until I managed to get a good look at you that morning a few weeks ago. You looked so pale and drawn—”

Mrs. Elias made a small noise that suddenly exploded into high pitched laughter.

“Oh, yes,” agreed Mrs. Risk. “I know that, too. What a collection of poisons you managed to cultivate in that garden of yours. I realize that I not only saved your life from Ike’s loving stranglehold, but I saved you from throwing your life away by murdering your husband. Tell me. Why didn’t you just try to escape along conventional means? Like talking to a divorce lawyer?”

Mrs. Elias gazed at Mrs. Risk long and carefully. Then she said, “I really hate this carrot juice. May I have some of that wine you’re drinking?”

“No, dear. Not until you’re better. Give it another month.”

Mrs. Elias sniffed at her glass and made a face. “To answer your question, because he said that if I ever tried to leave him, I’d be dead within the day. He said I was his, only his, and no one else would ever have me. He was terrifying. He never threatened…idly. I believed him. I have no family who could help me, so I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

They sipped composedly at their respective drinks.

Finally Mrs. Elias said. “So you poisoned Ike with his own concoction?”

The witch looked scandalized. “Of course not. I would never make paella with days-old reheated food. For pity’s sake. How disgusting.”

“You mean it was all fresh and—and poison free?”

“Every bite. Ike’s not the only fishmonger in town. How disgusting, making paella with leftovers. Those atrocious lunches. How could I poison a living creature, anyway? Tcha.” The witch made a face.

“Then how did you kill him?”

“Kill him? I certainly killed nobody. It was his obsession with you that killed him. His pathological jealousy made him imprison you in that house and ultimately drove him to destroy you. He was afraid he couldn’t hang on to you much longer, and if he couldn’t have you, no one would. He knew about the milkman, you see.”

Mrs. Elias began a protest that Mrs. Risk held up a palm to forestall. “I know. I know there was nothing going on between the milkman and you. But to someone like Ike, just the mere existence on the same planet of another male was more threat than he could handle.”

She smiled suddenly. “You know, I’ve never agreed with that movie song that Sam played again. About kisses all being the same. Do you know the one I mean?” She glanced at Mrs. Elias, who now gazed back with equanimity. “Charlie showed an unexpected flair, I thought,” said Mrs. Risk.

Mrs. Elias lifted her glass of carrot juice to her lips and said nothing.

“And don’t forget: Ike had also just received the shock of thinking he’d swallowed a few days’ worth of the poisons he’d been feeding you. I think by then he must have been adding fatal doses. I wonder what he thought when you kept living? Well, never mind. Rage plus fear, my dear, compounded by a macho stupidity he had of not taking care of his blood pressure properly. He killed himself.”

Together they gazed out over the water companionably for a while. Then the witch said, “By the way, I think it’s rather deplorable that the only thing you could think of to get yourself out of trouble was to murder. You need to learn other methods of surviving in this world, my dear.”

“Like you have?” Mrs. Elias smiled at the witch and stretched her young, robust, and not visibly depleted body. “Just please don’t call me Mrs. Elias anymore. That name brings back memories of my stomachaches. My name is Rachel.”

“Very well. Rachel Elias.”

“No, just Rachel.”

Mrs. Risk nodded. “My name is Mrs. Risk.”

“What can I call you?”

“You can call me Mrs. Risk. Fetch me that volume by that log, dear. We have a lot to do.”

T
HE WITCH OF
Wyndham-by-the-Sea took an appreciative sip of the Oregon Pinot Noir that Black Dan Harrington had opened just for her, and after complimenting him on his selection, mentioned that she never saw his wife, did she not like coming to his restaurant?

He poured a small sample of the wine for himself, then answered, “Oh, and that’s an old custom, handed down from my da, and to him from his da, keeping the wife apart from the way we make a living. It prevents the curse, you see.”

Black Dan nestled more comfortably in the white plastic chair, which was structured for lesser frames than his, sipped his Pinot and surveyed, with the expression of a cat full of cream, his restaurant’s tables. Each one, whether indoors or out here by the dock, had been filled with patrons since lunchtime. He’d hustled Chris Greco to work at the piano on the balcony at three this afternoon. Pete and Frank, who played saxophone and bass fiddle, respectively, had been called and were to join him as soon as they could arrive, instead of waiting for the customary seven o’clock set. Black Dan worked determinedly to see that Harrington’s Restaurant meant good food, good drink, and good jazz to its patrons.

The witch smiled down at her cat Jezebel, who had just yowled and curled her tail around Black Dan’s ankle. Jezebel never lost an opportunity to seduce someone who had access to fresh fish.

The witch said, “You don’t mean to tell me that you keep your wife away from here because of some curse an ancestor of yours dreamed up to keep a nagging wife away during the day?”

Black Dan looked anxious. “Oh, I know it sounds ridiculous, but the curse says that to allow your wife a bit of your business ‘will drive the food and drink from hungry mouths’.” He smiled back at her then. “My family has always been in the saloon and restaurant business. We have a vested interest in keeping mouths from going hungry or thirsty, you see.” As if to prove his point, he poured a little more wine into the witch’s glass.

He glanced at the boats bobbing like happy corks at their moorings in the technicolor sunset and added, after a sigh, “But you know, I should invite her to come. On a day like this, I have to believe that any curse would be helpless.”

A miraculous combination of benign sun, lazily lapping water, and fragrant breezes off the Sound this Tuesday had pried residents and shopkeepers of Wyndham-by-the-Sea from their air-conditioned cubicles, enticing them to breathe deeply and make ‘work’ merely a word in the dictionary.

The witch surveyed the crowd shrewdly. “I see you’ve added the entire Village Board of Trustees to your list of devotees.”

Today being the second Tuesday of the month, the Board meeting was slated to begin at eight at the Town Hall, but they’d gathered beforehand at Harrington’s, taking the two next-best tables. (The witch had the best one, as always.) They could be heard wrangling testily over rules of cabana rights at the beach.

“And visiting constabulary as well?” she added with elevated eyebrows, nodding towards a corner table.

Black Dan spared only a glance at the gentleman in question. “We had a bit of excitement here this morning. The leader of a gang of thieves was apprehended somewhere, still smoking from the heat of his latest in a series of jewel snatches, I gather—”

“You couldn’t possibly mean Georgie Fontana has been up to his old tricks again, could you?”

Black Dan’s blue eyes widened. “Indeed I do. How—”

“That police detective eating your crab cakes is from the same village that happens also to be the village called home by Georgie Fontana—one of New York’s more accomplished gem thieves. He usually collects a gang around himself. It was too perfect a match to overlook.” The corners of her mouth curled faintly upwards.

“A clairvoyant match, my dear. Some sort of written evidence pointed to Harrington’s as involved somehow, as a meeting place or something.” He shrugged. “The boy is supposed to be undercover, on the lookout for the rest of the desperadoes, but of course I’m not surprised
you
would spot him.” He grinned at her.

Just then, a girl with a dark curly mop of hair and an intent look on her small face came up to Black Dan with papers needing his signature. He signed with a flourish, then introduced her to the witch.

“Mrs. Risk,” he said to the witch, “I’d like you to meet the newest member of our staff, and one who shows great promise—at least, we’ve benefited greatly from her presence so far!—Miss Lizette Smith, the genius of reducing kitchen chaos into blessed order. Lizette, Mrs. Risk, one of Wyndham’s most handsome,” and here he wagged his devilishly curled, rust-tinted eyebrows at the witch, “and most intriguing residents.”

Lizette considered her with some curiosity, then smiled and said, “Nice to meet you.”

The witch considered her thoughtfully in return, and nodded. “Lovely,” was all she said.

“She was thrust upon us by Chef Vinnie’s wife, Tina. A cousin of some sort, aren’t you?” he continued vaguely.

Lizette nodded. “I put the checks for you to sign on your desk, under the brandy bottle, is that okay?”

“Perfect,” said Black Dan. He gazed over Lizette’s head at the bustling outdoor bar behind her, and again a smile curled, cat-like, on his handsome face. “Absolutely perfect. Thank you, darlin’. Take a few minutes to enjoy the breeze,” he added.

Lizette grinned and dashed away.

“Hardworking girl?” murmured the witch as she watched Lizette race to the kitchen door clutching her signed papers.

“The best. Well, since we seem to be overflowing with blessings, it’s back to work for this old son.” He stood up and replaced his chair beneath her table. “Even though we look like we’re prospering like Midas’ daughter, I don’t mind admitting to you that Harrington’s can nil afford to offend even the least of these patrons. This is our third season.” He sighed. “If we don’t record some solid profits in the old ledger this summer, we’ll be finding a new, less grand home, come September.”

He stood motionless for a moment, staring sadly at his feet, as if envisioning imminent departure, but then he looked up, energetic and merry again. “But don’t our prospects look grand, now? If you have any musical requests, just ferry them by waiter upstairs to Chris. He said, by the way, to tell you hello. Hello.” He turned to salute the piano player on the balcony with a wide grin and nod. Chris did an acknowledging riff on the keyboard and swung into a lively Thelonious Monk tune.